I started a digital photography course last night, at my old secondary school of all places. The photographer giving the course showed us that we would be doing our editing work in Photoshop CS on OS X. And golly gosh, guess who had a G3 iBook loaded up with Photoshop CS gathering dust in its packaging at home?

The iBook died at the end of December, out of the blue. Its hard drive died before that in August, shortly after returning from a trip to England. I didn’t have the cash to spare until October, at which point I coughed up the guts of 200 euros to have its hard drive replaced at a service centre. After another three weeks of it lying once again in its packaging while I hunted for an OS X image that it would actually boot from, I finally got it up and running, Tiger installed and a start made on installing Gentoo.

And then I came home from work one day in December to find that it refused to come out of standby or switch off. I finally applied my usual level of subtlety of the matter by removing the battery. Golly gosh, it wouldn’t turn of again afterward. I was pissed enough at this point that rather than looking for a fix, I just stuck it back into its packaging until last night when I set about repairing it. And you know what the problem was? A blown fuse in the mains adaptor. A five minute fix, tops. I felt like a right idiot after I popped in a new fuse and watched my iBook come back to life all of 30 seconds later.

But hey, I have my iBook working again and by golly I missed. I enjoy typing on laptop keyboards, for all it tends to give me verbal diarrhea. First off, I enjoy OS X for all I consider most of the UI to be designed by some sort of monkey with pretensions of being a left-bank artiste. As well as a huge selection of native applications, the Free BSD base allows a great deal of Unix and Linux software to run natively under Darwin. Projects such as Gentoo Portage and Fink among others give an excellent variety of software to play with. And lets not start on Widgets. I count over one thousand alone on the Apple homepage without dragging the plethora of third-party sites into this!

On top of that OS X is seemingly idiot-proof for the most part. Its networking setup is second-to-none in my mind for ease of use, for instance.

Oh and lastly on OS X, it uses the Bash shell by default and comes with vim. What more could a geek ask for?

But that’s about the extent of the Good Stuff. In the interest of fairness I may as well mention things like how the UI is degined by a drunk monkey with pretensions of being a left-bank artiste. Wait, I did, but it doesn’t hurt to hammer the point home. There’s also Apple’s hyprocrisy concerning little things. Like Intel.

“x86 sucks, PPC is better!”
“PPC sucks, x86 is beter!”

Sound familiar?

If any Apple users wish to yell at me, please feel free to do so, I always welcome feedback.